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Article published In:
Practices of Dialogue, Dialogues in Practice
Edited by Alain Létourneau, Geneviève Boivin and Nicolas Bencherki
[Language and Dialogue 13:2] 2023
► pp. 277–299

“Doing being an involved parent”

Practices for building the family-school partnership in parent-child homework dialogues

| University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

The present study investigates the increasingly common phenomenon of parental involvement in children’s education from a dialogic perspective. Drawing on video-recorded parent-child homework conversations in Italian families and adopting a conversation analysis-informed approach, the study analyzes how a value-laden cultural notion like ‘family-school partnership’ is given ‘dialogic existence’ through a variety of discursive practices. Specifically, it identifies four practices deployed by parents when supervising children’s homework: (1) making the teacher speak, (2) drawing parallels between family and school, (3) siding with the teacher, and (4) adopting a teacher-like evaluative stance. Beyond their specificities, all these practices reproduce the school’s institutional culture inside the home. It is argued that, through these practices, parents ‘do being involved’ in homework and implement a partnership based on shared values between family and school.

Keywords: parent-child dialogues, homework, parental involvement, family-school partnership, Italy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Parental involvement in homework: Recommendations from education studies and policies
  • 3.Data and analytic procedures
  • 4.‘Doing being involved’ in homework: Parents’ dialogic practices
    • 4.1Making the ‘teacher speak’
    • 4.2Drawing parallels between family and school
    • 4.3Siding with the teacher
    • 4.4Adopting a teacher-like evaluative stance
  • 5.Parental involvement and the family-school partnership as dialogic accomplishments. Concluding discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ld.00150.col
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